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This March 2012 item combines a claim that Medicare regulations require doctors to ask patients whether they keep guns in their houses with a 2009 piece about VA patients' being reported to Homeland Security and losing their concealed carry permits for answering yes to any one of three diagnostic questions. In the former case, although some doctors (particularly pediatricians) may ask their patients whether they have guns at home, there is no provision of Medicare regulations that requires them to do so; it's purely an individual initiative on the part of various doctors. In June 2011, Florida became the first state to pass a law prohibiting such inquiries when Gov. Rick Scott signed a law barring doctors from routinely asking patients if they own guns unless such questions are relevant to the patient's medical care or safety. In September 2011, a federal judge declared the law to be unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking its implementation, but in July 2014 an appeals court overturned that decision and upheld the law: In the latter case, the three questions about feeling stressed, threatened, or wanting to harm others are standard diagnostic queries for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which are routinely posed to VA patients (particularly those who have served in combat areas such as Iraq or Afganistan). Patients' answers to such questions are protected by doctor/patient confidentiality laws and, except in very limited circumstances, may not be disclosed to government agencies (or anyone else) without the patient's consent, as noted on the web site of the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA): In fact, as Pennsylvania television station WPMT reported in November 2014:
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